This morning on the Streetsblog Network, a cry of frustration from member blog Sprawled Out in the Milwaukee suburb of Franklin, Wisconsin.

Sprawled Out’s John Michlig has been looking at some of the findings from the Brookings Institution’s "The State of Metropolitan America" report, which we wrote about earlier in the week. The report, among other things, notes that traditional suburbs like Franklin are losing young, affluent, educated residents to cities with good transit and lively downtowns — a phenomenon one of the report’s authors refers to as "bright flight."

Michlig, whose blog is subtitled "The Search for Community in the American Suburb," writes:

So, the question is: What will suburbs like mine do to meet this challenge? I can tell you what Franklin, Wisconsin, is currently doing: Nothing.

No initiatives, projects, forums or incentive programs. In fact, we just pledged a half million dollars to a neighboring community for a superfluous highway interchange, a move that tells the world that Franklin is still about a decade behind the curve.…

At the same time, Franklin is pouring money into a streetscape design for a commercial strip that all but ignores transit options like dedicated bus lanes and Zipcar facilities. Instead, our big-ticket item on 27th Street is "enhanced lighting" — the seventh most popular item mentioned on preference surveys….

If success and sustainability are a destination, perhaps it’s time suburbs — mine in particular — realize that the road that brought them here won’t get them there.

More from around the network: Urban Out writes about what Cincinnati has that Indianapolis lacks — "the power of a place." Twin City Sidewalks tries to dispel some misconceptions about bike boulevards. And Broken Sidewalk wonders if a bike lane on a bridge could significantly increase ridership in Louisville, Kentucky.

Precisely why I don’t live in the suburbs. BTW, I am precisely that demographic–young, affluent, educated. I spent a decent amount of my money at local and privately-owned businesses, i.e. voting with my wallet. I hope not to have to raise kids in the ‘burbs, either. If not Oakland, then some other urban center.

nanter

This guy is dreaming. He thinks he is going to encourage introduction of dedicated bus lanes and Zipcar facilities in a suburb of a tiny city such as Franklin? He lives in a place that all but *requires* an automobile to get around, unless you are one of the poor who must risk his life every day to attempt transit by foot, bicycle, or transit. Dedicated bus lanes in a place with 99% car ownership? Zipcar? lol. Zipcar is in only a few, large, metro areas where there are enough people that have foregone automobile ownership to support the market.

We have no hope of seeing Zipcar here in Richmond. You can forget dedicated bus lanes. Bike lanes? You’d think that would be sellable in a city with a huge university population, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for any time in the near (20 years?) future. That’s in a city this size, and I’m talking about the center city, not the suburbs.

Unfortunately, that guy needs to sell his house and move somewhere else. Or get used to car dependence and sprawl hell. He’s pissing in the wind.

Darin

The problem with ‘bright flight’ in a place like Franklin is not based in the spending on highway interchanges and lighting or the lack of a neighborhood coffee place. It’s based on the omnipresence of detached houses, sprawled across their large, single-use zones. An area filled with this kind of housing demands car-centric infrastructure and makes the kind of pedestrian activity that would support a non-drive-through neighborhood coffee place all but impossible.

I grew up in the exurbs and complained about the same kind of thing until I moved to the urban core of the city. There’s no use complaining about your neighborhood’s lack of amenities that are attractive to young creatives if you live in a place that’s solely built on a housing model that demands car-centric, suburban complacency.

garyg

The “bright flight” phenomenon appears to be limited to a few large cities. Even in those few cities, the effect is small. Overall, college-educated people have been moving from cities to suburbs, not the reverse. From the Brookings report:

most metro areas saw further movement of college degree holders away from big cities, toward suburbs, during this decade. A few large cities like New York, Boston, and Washington posted a small edge over their suburbs in gaining college-educated adults from 2000 to 2008. But many more, such as Omaha, Tulsa, and Baton Rouge sustained significant losses in their share of metropolitan college graduates.

garyg happens to be right in his comments, at least based on the Brookings report cited in the article. The most educated people live in dense suburbs and this trend is intensifying in most urban areas. Only in NY, Boston and D.C. is there a net movement of the educated to the central city. Honestly, this matches my experience with my set of friends from College (I graduated in 1996 which makes me not quite young anymore), most of whom live in the bay area – but not one of whom lives in S.F. or another urban core. Mostly they ended up in places like Sunnyvale which is, coincidentally, held up in the report of the kind of place that attracts educated people. Maybe its different for folks in their 20′s, but if it is it hasn’t shown up in the statistics yet.

http://abstractnonsense.wordpress.com Alon Levy

Winston, the only part of Mix-ryG-son-dy’s comment that’s accurate is the blockquoted part. His interpretation is plain wrong.

The example of San Francisco is weird in many senses. It’s not surprising that it trends differently from the East Coast there. The first issue is that Silicon Valley’s overtaken San Francisco as a job center, especially for knowledge-intensive work; Stanford has a lot to do with it. The second is that there are actually a lot of people who prefer to live in SF, which leads some Silicon Valley companies to run shuttle vans to SF. It creates a nationally unique dynamic in which more people live in SF and work in Santa Clara County than the reverse. And the third issue is that even from a knee-jerk hipster perspective, some Bay Area suburbs, such as Berkeley and Palo Alto, are culturally acceptable in a way that their Eastern equivalents aren’t. (I have no idea about Sunnyvale).

garyg

Since my “interpretation” is almost word-for-word equivalent to the quoted text from the Brookings report, I have no idea why Alon Levy thinks it is “wrong.” One wonders what part of “most metro areas saw further movement of college degree holders away from big cities, toward suburbs, during this decade” isn’t clear to him.

http://abstractnonsense.wordpress.com Alon Levy

“Overall, college-educated people have been moving from cities to suburbs.” There’s no “overall” in the study – just separate trends for metro areas.

For what it’s worth, the metro areas that were the first to suburbanize last century are also the ones that are the first to reurbanize (read: gentrify). In 1925, suburbanization was limited to the Northeast and small bits of California; the rest of the country was still in the process of urbanizing, and even in the Northeast the cities were growing quickly.

garyg

“Overall, college-educated people have been moving from cities to suburbs.” There’s no “overall” in the study – just separate trends for metro areas.

When Alon Levy has no actual argument to offer, but can’t resist the urge to respond in some way, no matter how silly or irrelevant, he often resorts to meaningless pedantry, as in this case.

The report states that “a few large cities” had a “small” gain in college-educated adults relative to their suburbs, but that “many more” cities experienced “significant losses” in college-educated adults relative to their suburbs. In other words, the OVERALL trend has been a flow of college-educated adults out of cities and into suburbs, not the reverse.

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